Pithy, wise, and gently encouraging advice from an acclaimed fiction writer.
A demonstration of how precision, care, and hard work are the writer’s crucial tools.
McCann (Creative Writing/Hunter Coll.; Thirteen Ways of Looking, 2015, etc.), winner of a National Book Award and many other honors, draws upon 20 years of teaching to offer more than 50 brief chapters focused on all stages of the writing process. Although intended for beginning writers, the volume would be helpful to experienced writers, as well. Anyone hoping for rules, however, will instead find many lyrical aphorisms. Prose is “as close as you’ll get to dancing. Listen to it create itself.” As for plot, it must “twist our hearts in some way.” McCann sees writing as discovery of one’s self and the world: “Don’t write what you know, write toward what you want to know. Step out of your skin. Risk yourself.” Writing can begin with a philosophical idea or an obsession, but writers should be careful about becoming didactic. “You are not here,” writes the author, “to represent cultures or grand philosophies. You don’t speak for people, but with people.” Those people are invented characters, whom writers must know intimately. Details about motivations, foibles, and eccentricities all contribute to a character’s depth and credibility, even if those details do not find their way into the narrative. “What terrifies them? What do they feel most guilty about?” are among questions a writer needs to ask. Writers must read “adventurously. Promiscuously. Unfailingly” to develop an astute awareness of how narrative and sentences are built. Assuming that awareness, McCann tosses out myriad alternatives for writing issues such as structure and plot. Unlike many other writing guides, this one addresses finding an agent and editor and the “shell game” involved in getting a blurb. The author cautions against measuring one’s achievements against other writers and, refreshingly, advises, “don’t get too attached to the romantic illusions of yourself” and about the writing life. “Being a writer is not about cocaine or the White Horse Tavern.”
Pithy, wise, and gently encouraging advice from an acclaimed fiction writer.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59080-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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